Februar 22 2011

Release Ventuz 3 V3.01 - F1=Help

 
We are proud to announce that Ventuz 3 Version 3.01 is available for download.
As we are getting closer to the official release of Ventuz 3, we naturally are still fixing many bugs and adding great features, but what will really blow your mind is a complete, integrated, interactive help tool that will answer all the questions you have!
 





We know you have been waiting for it: here it is!

Our new interactive documentation gives an in-depth method for new Ventuz users and seasoned pros alike to learn the software. From editors to best practices, nodes to properties, the new documentation leaves little unanswered. Best of all, with the new architecture, the documentation can now continue to grow as Ventuz does.

To use it, press Shift-F1 to activate the new Help Bar, then hover over whatever you wish to learn more about, whether node, window or editor. In addition, the help tool offers all sorts of tips and tricks, keyboard-shortcuts, best practices as well as a comprehensive set of new example scenes for every node. These example scenes will now open directly from the help system without you needing to switch projects, thus allowing you to copy and paste nodes or trees. Due to current political events, we'd also like to categorically state you are welcome to plagiarize any of these help scenes.

And the best part is: you can access the help online as well. Follow this link!







To find out what Ventuz 3 is and how it differs from Ventuz 2008, please click here!


Release Notes - Ventuz 3 V3.01.00



FEATURE        F856         Introducing new Node: Excel Custom Range. This node provides the possibility to read a customizable range of Excel cells.
not applicable in Express Edition

FEATUREF680The Volume node can now override the bounding box size independently of the bounding box size of the child nodes.
 
FEATUREF673Scene statistics can now filter for Professional Nodes. This helps if one wants to create a scene compatible with the Express Edition.
 
FEATUREF672Scene Statistics can now display also local resources of the current scene. Before it displayed all global resource held in memory only.
 
FEATUREF670The import/export/link resource dialog displays all subfolders of selected data pools.
 
FEATUREF661All interaction nodes now have three new output boolean properties to ease usability: TouchInside is true if at least one touch is hovering over the active area of an interaction node. TouchPressed is true if at least one touch is pressed on the active area and TouchProcessing is true if the interaction node starts to generate output values. The latter two produce different results if the motion threshold in the project settings is not zero and movement has to be larger than that threshold before an interaction node actually reacts to it.
not applicable in Express Edition
 
FEATUREF636Interpolation nodes have a second target value for easily switch between two values.
 
FEATUREF634Added new Node to read an array of float values from Excel: Excel Range Array. This Node reads a defined range of floats from an Excel workbook. This node can be used to visualize graphs easily.
not applicable in Express Edition
 
FEATUREF629Added option (Options->Layout) to hide/display Help-Bar on application start-up.
 
FEATUREF600The Touch Pattern node now has a new output event that is fired when no matching pattern was found.
not applicable in Express Edition
 
FEATUREF304Directory node now provides a list of all found files and has the ability to sort the list by name, date, size.
 
FEATUREF301Introducing new node: Billboard Axis. This axis rotates objects so that they always point to the camera.
not applicable in Express Edition
 
FEATUREF297Added new Node to read and output a customizable range of Excel cells: Excel Custom Range. Via Custom Model a user-defined range of values can be read at once from an Excel workbook.
not applicable in Express Edition
 
FEATUREF296Math Effect nodes have a Modulo Property to keep interpolated values within a certain re-occurring range like rotations, percentages, etc.
 
CHANGEC809Scroll Text node now automatically starts scrolling when the node is added to a scene. This change does not affect the behavior of a scroll node when loading a scene. In addition, the control methods have been made favored so they appear even if the user has "show only favored properties" activated.
 
CHANGEC755The default linear attenuation of a Point Light Source has been changed from 1.0 to 0.1. This looks better and fixes an inconsistency since the reset value of the property was already 0.1
 
CHANGEC753The Node 'Relative ViewPort' has been renamed to 'Viewport/Background'.
 
CHANGEC729Changed Texture node to have a default max-anisotropy of 8 instead of 1. This way changing the filter from linear to anisotropic immediately shows an improvement in texture quality.
 
CHANGEC709The Play/Pause/Stop/... methods of the Quicktime Movie node are now marked as favored so they are visible even when the user has "Show only favored properties" activated in the application options. This Movie Clip node already had those methods favored.
 
CHANGEC641In the Value Switch node changed the index format of the input properties to XXX to avoid strange sorting with more than 10 inputs.
 
CHANGEC635To improve usability, the Enter/Leave event behavior of Touch Button, Touch Translation, Touch Rotation and Touch Transformation nodes has been changed. Now an enter event is only fired for the first touch entering the active area and a leave event is only fired when the last touch leaves the area. In addition, a new Boolean property "TouchInside" has been added.
 
CHANGEC622Resources (images, movies, etc.) are now automatically imported to the Project folder if used in a scene. The Save-As dialog is not displayed anymore. This can be changed in the Options (Load&Save).
 
CHANGEC204Source binding of 'Texture' properties between two Texture nodes is possible now.
 
BUGB827The License Manager dialog had some flaws. Fixed!
 
BUGB850Fixes the intersection testing for interaction nodes and in-renderer picking for meshes that are restricted to render a specific subset. The previous behavior ignored the subset ID and performed intersection testing on the whole mesh even if only one subset was rendered.
 
BUGB827The License Manager dialog had some flaws. Fixed!
 
BUGB824Scan of system fonts couldn't be canceled.
 
BUGB823The Typeface selection editor asked for importing standard system fonts as well. It now asks for non-standard fonts only.
 
BUGB813RSS Feed reader update interval was corrupt. Especially the first load took much time. Fixed!
 
BUGB811The Images2CubeTexture node did not handle non-power-of-two textures correctly. This is fixed now!

BUGB803MultiPlay mode of Sound Node didn't work. Fixed!
 
BUGB798The Damper node did not fire the 'Reached' event under certain conditions. This is fixed!
 
BUGB797Editing Annotation in zoomed Content Editor didn't work correctly. Fixed!
 
BUGB796The 'Shake' feature in the Content Editor has been removed, because it caused unwanted deletion of bindings. Use SHIFT-DEL in Content Editor to delete Bindings.
 
BUGB792Fog and RenderOption nodes affected Blur Texture nodes. Fixed!
 
BUGB769Fixes an issue where Direction Lightsource were not correctly transformed when Apply Axis was active.
 
BUGB757In the AlphaBlending node two blending settings could be used which are actually not supported by DirectX 9! Fixed!
 
BUGB756Fixes incorrect manipulation gizmo rendering caused by shader nodes.
 
BUGB752Fixes an issue that prevented file dialogs from accessing files in the windows library folders (i.e. "Pictures", "Documents", "Music").
 
BUGB750The Arrange mechanism did not work in a Switch-Arrange-Text combination. Text elements have not been arranged if the Switch changed to a new case. This is fixed now!
 
BUGB745Delay node did not initialize correctly after loading and thus did not work properly. Fixed!
 
BUGB725Fixes an issue where a cylinder could cause an exception when extreme tessellation values were used. Now uses larger precision internally to create the mesh but comes with a small performance hit. However, it should not be notable in almost all real-life situations.
 
BUGB710Fixes an issue that caused bounding box visualization and rendering statistics to be activated when resetting the user interface layout. Also addresses situations where the renderer button states were inconsistent to what the renderer actually did.
 
BUGB613Closing the Script editor didn't allow to answer 'No' when queries for saving changes.
not applicable in Express Edition
 
BUGB197Old Excel file format (.xls) could not be read on x64 Windows systems. This is fixed now!
 














Please download the new release here!